Report tips possible music discovery app from Twitter

For years, Twitter has resisted blockbuster acquisition offers, opting to stay the course and build what it believes can be a broad communications platform that will stand the test of time. Now the company is reportedly laying out the next phase of that plan with a new application focused on music.

The first rumblings of this new music app came via a report from CNET that said Twitter had acquired music discovery service We Are Hunted. According to a source, the acquisition is part of a plan to use the technology from We Are Hunted to launch an official Twitter Music app that would allow iOS users to discover new music based on the people a user follows on Twitter.

Twitter has not confirmed the reported acquisition, but in a follow-up report, AllThingsD claimed that the new Twitter Music app will not only rely on SoundCloud for its music streaming functionality (as the original report claimed), but it will also include other, unnamed music-streaming companies as well. But the real revelation from this follow-up report is that the Twitter Music will supposedly include music videos, made possible with support from music video service Vevo.

This latest move mirrors Twitter's acquisition of Vine as a means to launch its own video-sharing app. By all appearances, the Vine integration into Twitter was a success, particularly because the app, which only allows six-second video clips, matched Twitter's popular abbreviated information-sharing aesthetic.

However, if these latest reports turn out to be accurate, bringing full-length music video content to the platform could be an early hint that Twitter is planning to broaden its reach beyond short form content, perhaps eventually putting it on a more competitive footing with the likes of Facebook and Google+.